Gene Rain

There was a point about halfway through Gene Rain where I just gave up trying to figure out what was going on. That's not from a lack of trying, but rather the fact that nothing about this game makes sense. From the incomprehensible voice acting to the confusing story to the terrible cliffhanger ending, I was left completely dumbfounded by almost every second of this debut release from Deeli Network. This is not how you start a brand new science fiction series.

Set a few decades in the future, this is the story of a world that has been radically changed by an event known as the Gene Rain. We learn from a brief video (and from reading the description on the Steam page) that humans, robots and hybrids are forced to put aside their differences and work to end all of the world's conflicts. This basically means jumping between three different characters and getting sucked into an obscene amount of cover-based firefights.

A large portion of this game is told through flashbacks, which allows us to see the various parts of the war through the eyes of the different factions. There's Li Ying the human, Salman the robot and a half-human/half-robot hybrid named Alex. I would tell you more about them, but this game doesn't give you an opportunity to get to know who they are or what their personality is like. For all intents and purposes, all three of them could have been robots. They are basically just third-person avatars that get into a bunch of repetitive shootouts.

At its best, Gene Rain feels like a low-budget version of Gears of War. The characters feel heavy and lumber around the stages just waiting to get into a skirmish. The problem is that those skirmishes are all this game has. This is the kind of game where you walk through an empty and linear stage until you get to a long, drawn-out fight. Then more walking, fighting, walking, fighting, and so on. With the exception of the confusing cinemas, there's nothing that breaks up this game from this simple and monotonous loop.

You could argue that this is the same structure that made the Gears of War games so popular, but that would be selling them short. Those games knew how to change the atmosphere between stages, give us real character moments and make every location more interesting than the last. There's nothing like that in Gene Rain. The stages look fine, but are mostly empty and lifeless. There's no care put into the plotting or pacing, and I never got a good sense of who these characters were. It's just an excuse to walk foward, fight, walk forward, fight, walk forward ... you get the point.

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It certainly doesn't help that the third-person action is a mess. Much like Gears, the idea is to hide behind cover and take shots at enemies in the distance. The problem is that this game has a bad habit of popping you out of cover for no reason. And not just once or twice, but all the time. In practically every single skirmish. It often feels like it happens completely randomly, and usually means you'll means that you'll take massive amounts of damage, or even die.

And that isn't the only problem I had with the combat. I found the aim assist to be overbearing to the point of making certain boss battles almost impossible to play. I think the game is supposed to target the enemy nearest your reticule, but that rarely happens, if ever. It felt like every time I pulled the trigger I would target some random bad guy far away from the action. This is especially bad when you're trying to focus on a boss in the distance and your cursor keeps getting dragged to other enemies. This also happens when you try to manually aim, leading to some truly frustrating firefights.

Oh, and did I mention that the game isn't very good at remembering your preferred settings? I'm somebody who plays these games with an inverted look, so you can probably imagine how jarring it is when the game mysteriously switches back to the standard look for no reason. And don't think you can just change it in the options, because there are certain characters (and mech suits) that force players to use the standard look, which meant that I was constantly going from inverted to standard back to inverted. How is this kind of thing still happening in 2018?

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Speaking of which, the voice acting is atrocious. There are characters with major speaking parts that are nearly impossible to understand due to the broken English. And I'm not even sure real people provided all of the voices. There's a human in the game that has a voice so robotic, that I am convinced their part was created using one of those text-to-speech voice generators. The whole thing is made so much worse by the sound mixing, which has the music at least five times louder than it needs to be at any given moment. Between the broken English and the music, I had a hard time knowing what was going on. Subtitles are an absolute must.

And then there's the ending, which is easily one of the most anticlimactic conclusions I've ever seen. I won't get into spoilers here, but it's worth noting that Gene Rain ends with the words "To Be Continued." There is no satisfying ending here, just a bunch of questions I could barely hear over the music. And considering that I'm dubious we'll actually see this series continue, I think this is a pretty terrible way to end the game. It's a real slap in the face.

At its best, Gene Rain is a monotonous third-person shooter with an ambitious story. Unfortunately, the shoddy combat, questionable voice acting, incomprehensible story and lifeless characters make this short action game feel like a real slog. It doesn't help that it has one of the least satisfying endings in recent memory. This game is a mess.